African Studies: Publisher Data for Understanding the Research Landscape

Research can only be truly inclusive and global if voices from all locations, genders, ethnicities, backgrounds, and areas of experience are heard and represented across all stages of knowledge production and academic publishing. Although the academic publishing process plays a key role in supporting the dissemination and impact of high-quality research within the research lifecycle, it can also be a propagator of inequality. In this paper I ponder over this question: ‘what can we learn from publisher data about the state of the African Studies research landscape?’’. I consider how the systems and tools invested in by commercial publishers allow for the collection, collation and analysis of detailed data that serve a threefold purpose: supporting authors to make informed choices about publication routes, surfacing opportunities for journal editors to examine their practices and to address inequalities, and providing evidence-based information to publishers so as to help them in strategic decision making. Lifting the curtain on the data that can be gathered by the major publisher Routledge, Taylor & Francis (T&F), this study interrogates comprehensive data covering submissions, published research content, acceptance rates, peer reviewers and usage, collected from internal T&F systems, dashboards and reporting tools.. The analysis of the publisher data uncovers that there are currently patterns of overrepresentation of some countries and regions – notably South Africa, the USA, and the UK - within African Studies publishing, and underrepresentation of the majority of Africa-based scholars, with lower numbers of submissions converting to published papers, as well as fewer invited reviewers. The data surfaced underscore the ongoing need for publishers, journal Editors and society partners to both continue and expand their work to diversify all corners of the publishing process.